Leaving Home Doesn’t Mean Leaving Everything Behind

The story of Abraham’s life opens with a dramatic declaration: “Leave your land and your relatives and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.” This is different from the classic “hero’s journey” that mythologist Joseph Campbell writes about. Even if Abraham will be going from a familiar to an unfamiliar place and will confront challenges that will transform his understanding of himself and the world, he is not returning.

It is difficult to believe that the lesson we are meant to learn from Abraham is that fulfilling our destiny requires abandoning our past and the people in it. Such an interpretation seems less like a journey of heroic transformation and more like justifying social isolation for the sake of religious growth, which runs counter to the example Abraham sets throughout his life after departure. Also, Campbell’s heroes are heroes not simply because they find their way back home but because they benefit the people they return to. Abraham is also meant to be a blessing to all families of the earth, not all families except his own.

Does creating a new life require us to forget the world we leave behind, or can we move beyond our past without severing our connection to it?

The story’s beginning seems to emphasize this message of complete departure, since before God’s command to Abraham we know nothing about him or why he is told to leave. Well…this is not exactly true. We know that Abraham married his niece (assuming that Sarai and Iscah are the same person) and that his father already took the family from the land of Ur of the Chaldeans to move to Canaan, settling in Haran along the way.

Even if you want to argue that “your land” refers to Haran, Abraham’s new adopted homeland, Abraham never seems to completely cut himself off from it or the rest of his family. When following God’s command to leave his relatives, he nevertheless brings his wife and nephew with him. In choosing a wife for his son, Abraham tells his servant to go to “my land and my relatives,” spurning the current residents of the land that God had shown him, even while he explicitly prohibits taking Isaac back there. Isaac follows in his father’s footsteps, sending Jacob back to his extended family’s home to find himself a wife.

In the Bible, a “father’s house” is more than a place of residence, it refers to kin and clan identity. As such, it seems difficult to understand how Abraham completely left his “father’s house” behind. For example, after the conquest of the land of Canaan, Joshua assembles all the tribes of Israel at Shechem to renew the national covenant. He begins his declaration with a retelling of the people’s origin story: “Long ago your fathers – Terach, father of Abraham and father of Nachor – lived beyond the Euphrates and worshiped other gods, but I took your father, Abraham, from the other side of the [Euphrates] river and led him through the whole land of Canaan…” In his declaration of political identity and tribal kinship, Joshua does not start with Abraham leaving Haran but rather with their forefather, Terach, living in Haran.

The commandment to leave, therefore, can’t be understood as God asking Abraham to break all ties with his past. In the greater context of the book of Genesis, Abraham’s departure should be understood as yet another attempt at creation. Unlike the first creation story we read in Genesis, God does not start with a blank slate, and, unlike the story of Noach, God doesn’t erase His work to start again. This time, God is creating a new world out of what already exists. Abraham must build a new identity and nation out of the experiences and relationships that have already shaped him. His future will be informed by where he came from but not determined by it.

Abraham and his family will have a new, independent identity – “I will make of you a great nation…I will make your name great” – but that identity is developed by what he is through his relationship with God; he is not defined by what he is not. Abraham is also destined to change the world, and you can’t do that by cutting yourself off from it.

The lesson that Abraham teaches about forming a new identity, leaving one’s past behind yet not totally cutting oneself off from it, is reiterated in the Talmud and by subsequent Jewish legal authorities through the legal comparison of a convert to a newborn child. The idea is that both have a whole new life ahead of them, yet even if their lives are their own, both still have a connection to and responsibilities towards their parents and family.

For all of us, Abraham’s life can serve as a different type of “hero’s journey.” Not all heroes have to leave – and not all heroes have to return to – where they were born or grew up. Yet as they transform into the people they become, heroes should never forget where they came from and who they are responsible for. It’s not that everything from our past deserves preservation, but moving forward doesn’t mean that we can simply ignore the past either. Rather, heroic creation is finding ways to become a blessing even to the world we leave behind.